Within the field of computing, many scenarios involve the provision of a document service across a set of servers, which may be arranged in a set of one or more clusters. For example, the documents may represent objects of an object-oriented computing environment; records of a database; or messages in a distributed email system. In these and other scenarios, the document service may serve a set of client applications operated by one or more users of the document service.
In such scenarios, the server set may be configured to provide the document service to the one or more users in view of various considerations. As a first example, the document set may be distributed across the server set in various ways. As a second example, the server set may feature various types of replication, where two or more copies of one or more documents are stored by one or more servers, in order to facilitate fault detection and tolerance, availability, and concurrent access by two or more users. As a third example, the servers of the server set may be partitioned into two or more clusters, which may in turn be geographically distributed and/or allocated for particular roles. As a fourth example, the document service may serve discrete sets of documents to two or more clients, and it may be desirable to enforce security policies, such as permitting access of a particular data set to a first user while prohibiting access by a second user. As a fifth example, the document service may involve various types and volumes of communication among the servers regarding the state of the server set, such as the addition, removal, or reconfiguration of various servers. As a sixth example, it may be desirable to configure the server set in a flexible manner, such that changes to the server set may be implemented to adjust these and other characteristics of the server set and the document service.
In view of these considerations, an administrator may choose a configuration of the server set to achieve a combination of such features suitable for the types and uses of the document set. Many such features of the architecture of the servers, such as the network topologies, network communication and routing algorithms, and load-balancing techniques, may contribute to such configuration.